Hi, you can call me Sohee. My friends and I had a sticky situation earlier at Dillard’s when we were hanging out, and I’d like to know if we were in the wrong or not. Thanks for reading!

My friends and I are all minor high schoolers, and we look like minors as well. There were three of us; me (female), another girl, and another boy, both very dear friends of mine. We decided to all try on the same dress just for laughs, and my male friend agreed to it as well. He’s not gay or trans, he just wanted to have fun with us and we’re high schoolers after all, we do stupid things for fun from time to time.

Well as you know, Dillard’s has clothing of different genders all over the place. One block had a wall with suits on one side and dresses on the other side, so we decided to use the fitting room on that wall just because it was the closest. The fitting rooms had no labels, no gender signs, nothing - just two dressing rooms next to a wall of mostly dresses and a few suit jackets on the other side.

I waited outside as my female friend and male friend went into separate dressing rooms to try them on. One of the female employees says something to a male employee (I think he was either a manager or a security guard as he had on a black outfit), who then comes over to me and demands if “a male is in the ladies’ dressing room.”

I was bewildered and I told him that yes, my male friend was in the dressing room in a room by himself. The male employee starts screaming at me to get him out of there and that he’s not supposed to be in there because it’s the ladies’ dressing room. Neither me nor my friends had had any clue that these dressing rooms were gendered. I covered my mouth and apologized profusely to both the male and female employee and told my male friend to put his clothes back on and come out. He apologized from inside and hurried to come back out.

I was apologizing like MAD, explaining that we hadn’t known that they were gendered. The male employee bangs on the door of the room my male friend is in and screams at him to get out of there before turning to me and demanding how I didn’t know it was a ladies’ room in the middle of a bunch of ladies’ clothes.

I apologized again, and I looked around - yes, the clothes in that row were all for ladies, but the men’s clothes were just on the other side of the block? I explained that I really hadn’t known because there was no label on the dressing rooms.

He continues to scream at me for a minute until my male friend came hurrying out - he’s a really shy person, and I could see he was inches away from having a panic attack. The male employee screams in his face to “GET OUT” and he storms away and my friend apologized and ran, it took me and my female friend a while to find him trying to calm himself.

I was apologizing to my friends for the rest of the day for not knowing that the rooms were gendered, we didn’t blame each other although we did shoot some insults about that male employee later on. I’m thinking about it now, though, and I’d like to know if there was anything we did wrong. I feel horrible for coming up with the idea of trying on dresses in the first place. My male friend was very shaken for the rest of the day.

AITA?